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You know I love television, I’ve promoted its cultural, psychological, and physical benefits here in this blog enough. You know that. But the Emmys are the one exception. This batch of back slapping circle jerkers get together each year to supposedly “celebrate” the best of the best. Well, I’m going to tell you this incestuous relationship only leads to celebrating the worst of the best, the best being TV of course. If this was truly the best where was River Monsters? Where were the Kardashians on the so called red carpet? Where were the housewives of New Jersey, the Amish Mafia, The Barefoot Contessa? And most of all, where was season 11 of the most watched drama on network television, Naval Criminal Investigative Service? Where was Emily Wickersham? What a joke. Most importantly, where was my vote? Where does the common man/woman get his/her say?

Meanwhile shows like Orange is the New Crap, Game of Throwups, Downtown Abbey continue to garner undeserved accolades. Talk about a crime that should be investigated. Put Gibbs’ team on it!

The problem is the Emmy council, or whatever you call it, is run by one of the international conspiracy outfits, the highly secretive Bilderbergs, The Council on Foreign Relations, or the Trilateral Commission. Maybe somebody else. I’m sure Alex Jones knows. It’s another example of the elite oligarchs thinking they know what’s better for “the masses.” The idea should not be about what’s good for us, but about maintaining the liberty of our entertainment choices. These eggheads and silver spoon manipulators think they should rule the common man for his own good. Well listen up folks, the last time I checked this was still a representative republic and not a dictatorship. But democracy only happens when the common man takes the military-industrial-media bull by the horns and dumps the elites out of the thrones of Emmy power.

Good TV

We need the equivalent of an Emmy Tea Party. Boycott the awarded shows on cable and streaming media. Threaten to drop HBO and PBS from your satellite package. On commercial television refuse to buy from corporations that continue to advertise during these bad shows. Disguise ourselves as ethnic stereotypes and raid the local Best Buy or WalMart and dump the DVDs for shows like Big Bang Theory or the overtly socialist Saturday Night Live into the equivalent of Boston Harbor. Make the Emmy a death sentence for any show that truly doesn’t deserve it. That is the only chink in the armor of the elite media types and we need to drive a wedge into it. All they respond to is money, money, money, so hit ’em where it hurts ’em the most.

Bad TV

Only if we, the common people, wrestle the reigns of power from the elitist snobs and the fixers can we hope to keep television the life enriching, some say life saving medium, it was always meant to be. Maybe then the Emmys will mean something good. Otherwise you are going to be consigned to watching Modern Family for the rest of your life. Need I say more?

Update: Well now the former (yeah, right) Soviet Republic of Russia has invaded the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine. If people didn’t think that the former Soviet Republic of Georgia wasn’t just a Russian warm-up to imperialistically invading, occupying, and ultimately reabsorbing parts that were formerly the USSR, well then you’re just plain stupid. This is going to make American imperialism look naive by comparison and the Yugoslavian breakup look like a day in the park. Too bad nobody but the poor Ukranians on the ground are going to fight against it.

If this had happened to say West Germany in 1972 would we be sitting around on our asses and just wringing our hands? What do we have all these nuclear weapons for? If the enemy doesn’t credibly think you will use them, then we might as well throw them all away.

Oh, and why does the media keep calling it an invasion of the Crimea? If somebody invaded California they wouldn’t say California was invaded, they’d say the United States of America had been invaded. Let’s call a spade a spade: the Ukraine has been invaded.

What happens when they start invading places that weren’t even part of the USSR? I believe we in the West will eventually look on the USSR as “the good ol’ days.”

Ras-Putin “former” KGB agent and present General Secretary of the Communist Party and International Public Enemy #1

While the Soviet Union, er, I mean the former Soviet Republic of Russia hosts the the Wintercon, in Sochi their puppet government in the Ukraine continues to violently oppose the will of their own people to have closer ties to the EU in the hopes of someday joining this confederation of peaceful autonomous states.

Crimean Welcoming Committee

This just proves once again that thetyrannical country of the Soviet Union, er, I mean Russia never

deserved the choice of being the Olympic host. Politics of the IOC swindle awarded these games to a communist, er, I mean country run by a violent dictator. In fact that the entire winter games have been ruled by corruption. It is clear that the people of Sochi, except for the corrupt government stooges, hate that they were even picked for the venue. The Olympic village itself, especially athlete accommodations are a shambles, and outside the village itself is a dangerous host city run by the Soviet, er, I mean Russian mob. This city is also one of the worst areas in the country for ethnic and gender hatred and violence.

Ukraine Repression

The entire mess shows how corrupt the IOC is itself, full of kickbacks and kiss up politicians. The current games are a disgrace and just should have never been held at all.

Der Spiegel called it again and I’d never thought I’d thank the Germans for anything but the German press has done a better job of protecting the US citizens’ liberty and privacy than anyone in our own sorry press or government. Anyway, here are two links, the first to the Der Spiegel article on how the NSA both steals your privacy and builds inherent flaws into your digital security so they can exploit your resources for whatever they want and also leave you vulnerable to attack. The second link is to a talk by Jacob Appelbaum about why you should be very scared by this.

The Great Amazon Swindle prepackaged for your pleasure. Admittedly only presents one side of the story of how multinational corporations stifle and eliminate dissenting voices. Written as a poke in the eye, daring badreads or Amazon to delete it; the desperate voices of literary freedom that cried out when a corporation chose to turn a thriving social network into a mere catalog.

One negative is that this collection of dissenting voices doesn’t do enough to identify the remoras that are so eager to neck-suck Jeff Bezos and the ultimate flim-flam man Otis Chandler. We want to know who besides the coddled goodreads authors are laughing all the way to the bank.

Well Amazon finally screwed the pooch with GoodReads. I said this would happen as soon as Amazon acquired GR. Blow hards like David Gaughran who were probably already getting kickbacks from Amazon provided Amazon apologetics but I could see through the hypocrisy.

What happened? Well last Friday, as most of the GR staff were probably hitting the freeway, GR announced a new censorship policy. They would now delete reviews completely, without warning or notice, that were prejudicial towards authors when they felt the author comments from the reviewer were not relevant to the book review at hand or just plain hostile to the author. At the same time they said they would start deleting user book shelves where they deemed the shelf title or shelf contents also violated this policy, say if I had a shelf which was called “worthless authors who’s books I will never buy or read.” They will delete these completely without notice. Oh, and if you admit you couldn’t finish the book because it was so bad, they’ll delete that review too. You have to finish the book now to post a review that won’t get “removed.”

They provided all this information strictly through a group thread, no real announcement to anyone and had already started deleting content without warning. The Friday “bad news” drop is a typical ploy used by government and corporations so nobody has to deal with it, it in theory has no effect or a dampened effect by Monday. Amazon, er, I mean GoodReads employed the same sleazy tactic.

When Evil Corporations Take Over

This entire fiasco comes out of the fact that instead of being an independent entity like GR used to be it is now essentially a division of Amazon a bookseller. Smell something fishy in Denmark? Do I see a conflict of interest?

Another factor was the whiny GR authors, many of whom never published anything worthwhile (GR is flooded with mainly worthless self-published authors as well as a few good ones). These authors whined about being attacked and unfairly treated. The fact that GR is now a division of a bookseller leads them to try to protect authors, delete negative reviews, negative book shelves, etc. I assume the next shoe will be deleting one-star reviews from the ratings. Who is unfairly treated now?

What can you do? Well there are already fledgling sites like BookLikes that offer a level of competition. In addition there is still LibraryThing. You can export all your GR content (including all the reviews) to a .csv file that can be read into MS-Excel and usually transferred to the alternate biblio-social networks like BL and LT.

Boycott GoodReads and Amazon. There are alternatives to buy books from, even a lot of Kindle content can be purchased directly from publishers. Go to an independent bookseller. Barnes and Noble needs the money anyway if you want to see a viable alternative to Amazon in the future.